The rules for Why.Net customers are pretty simple and can be
summarized in a few points. A long lawyer-style version is also
available, but that would just put you to sleep. If you don't
plan on following these rules, please don't sign up for any Why.Net service.

Things not to do at Why.net

Don't sell, promote, rent, or trade in anything that is illegal,
infringes the works of others, or do anything that would make you
nervous if you did it in front of a police station.

Don't use your hosting or other access to bully, to harass, to harm or
threaten to harm any person or organization in any way.

Mass e-mailing/messaging is prohibited, except to those who have
provided their own address to you or your organization via a verifiable
opt-in process (such as the result of a purchase where they agreed to
receive mail, or a query to your organization) that occurred in
the past 18 months. Mass mailings/messaging to addresses that you
obtained from a third party, or to addresses obtained from
recipients more than 18 months ago (with no recent re-confirmation of
recipient interest or address validity) are forbidden, regardless of any
less-stringent local law or custom. Here, all spammers will be shot.

Web sites hosted here or DNS redirection to sites that we consider
to have been established solely to benefit from a UCE/Spam attack
are forbidden and associated domain name references will be made as non-usable
as possible. The offending URL and any associated URLs may be reported
to the "Do They Spam?" web browser black-list at our discretion. Spam
benefactors will also be shot.

Don't try to harm, break-into, port-scan or access any device on
the Internet that you don't have prior permission to use. (Web sites
and similar public access systems have implied permission to access
their materials, but it doesn't give you the right to go into restricted
areas or to try to tamper with the system security.) To go or try to
go where you are not supposed to go can violate the Texas Computer Crime law,
and at the least you will lose your account and be charged a penalty
(see below) if complaints are received or abuse is detected. Doing
the computer equivalent of turning doorknobs to see if they are unlocked
is illegal under Texas law. Please do not try this from here.

Don't use broadcast forums (such as USENET Newsgroups, IRC/Chat) for
advertising goods or services, unless that group or channel expressly
allows the message content that you want to send. Be advised that 99.9%
of these news groups and channels prohibit all forms of advertising.
In cases where such messages are allowed, any sent must comply with all
group-specific rules, including frequency, topic, size and format.

Providing false or incomplete customer information, falsely stating
your geographic location or identity, or falsely stating the intent of use
are all grounds for service termination. Setting up an account on behalf
of another party is not allowed.

Some services are only available to persons in certain geographic
areas. (These customers may have to provide proof of their location.)
Access from outside the specified service area is not allowed, even if
access is being attempted by an authorized customer. Attempting to bypass
geographic service limitations via proxies and other means is considered
to be an improper use of the service.

If an individual service has additional rules unique to that service,
they are listed in the description of that service. All rules listed here
still apply.

In short:

Why.Net reserves the right to refuse service to anyone or any
organization, and to discontinue already-established service if improper
activity occurs.
We reserve the right to ammend the rules as people find new ways to get
into trouble. Changes go into effect when posted.

When there is a Rule Violation or similar Abuse

Customers who violate the rules may be charged clean-up fees of no less
than $500 US per abuse incident reported or detected, when that incident
is determined by our staff to not be accidental in nature. We are
reasonable about this, but repeated occurrences of the same problems
may not be excused.

Service may be partly or completely suspended without advance notice when
an abuse or rule violation is detected or reported. In accidential cases,
service would be resumed as soon as the problem is addressed, and a
clean-up charge would usually not occur. If the same problem or type
of problem occurs over and over again, clean-up charges could then start
to be made. An example of this would be a machine that keeps getting
re-infected by long-known exploits (which current virus scanning software
would catch), and the owner does little or nothing to protect their
equipment from future incidents. Habitual issues will result in service
termination and clean up fees being charged.

In cases of service termination, the account holder will be immediately
charged for the remainder of duration of the service term. Our staff is
the sole authority on what is and isn't abuse or a violation of our rules.
The customer also agrees to pay any clean-up charges that result from
abuse and/or harm that the users of the account and/or their equipment
causes.
Customers agree to all of these things when accepting the Terms
of Service from Why.net.

Illegal activities that are reported to us or discovered may also be
reported to law enforcement. (Like other U.S. Internet providers, we
will respond to Digital Millennium Copyright Act - DMCA - notifications,
and will suspend service as necessary until violating materials are
removed or we receive a satisfactory explanation of their right to be
presented and the purported copyright owner or their representative agrees.)

Payment

To avoid a service interruption, please make sure your account balance
is received in full by the due date stated on your invoice. If you pay by
credit card, let us know when your credit card expiration date changes as
soon as you receive and activate the new credit card, or if you change any
information associated with your credit card account.

A service charge of up to $50 US may be levied for bounced, disputed,
or a repeatedly declined payment method, and service may be interrupted
until a resolution occurs. If reasonable attempts fail to resolve a
payment dispute, service may be canceled and the unpaid charges of
the remainder of the contract period may be reported to collection
and credit reporting agencies as bad debt.

If you wish to cancel, please e-mail us or call our billing department.
For security reasons, you will need to include the account access code
from one of the two most recent invoices (these change on each invoice).
You must contact us to cancel prior to the start of the next billing
period. Otherwise, you will likely be charged the full amount for that
next period.

Service Availability

All Internet access, visibility and function is provided on an "AS IS"
basis, without any warranty. Because dozens or even hundreds of entities
may be involved in getting Internet data between our systems and some
other place, we can only be responsible for outages and malfunctions that
occur on our equipment. In the event of multiple systems or services
failing at the same time, services are returned to operation in the order
that we see as benefiting the most customers, and as equipment can be
repaired or replaced and data recovered.

When service outages are required that will last for more than a few
minutes, they will be announced as early as practical in the News section
of the company web site. In most cases, you will not receive individual
advance notice by e-mail, unless the outage is specific to your service or
a small number of clients, including you. An example of this might be if
your web site needs to be relocated and we need you to re-publish its
contents to the new server or modify your domain name records to point
to the new system.

In general, such managed outages are performed during the traditional
low-activity periods for a given type of service, but since the Internet
is a world-wide thing, your busy time could be everybody else's quiet time.

Customer Privacy

Our goal is to not disclose any information about any customer to any
third party, including government entities, unless a court order or
other lawful demands are made, or you have committed a violation of the
rules and have harmed that third party. For rule-abiding customers,
we will not sell, trade, barter or otherwise exchange customer information
with other businesses or organizations for any purpose. (Exception:
For customers who pay by credit card, we will convey information to the
payment service provider that is sufficient to complete the transaction,
which typically includes the name that appears on the credit card,
the card number, the card expiration data, any card security code,
and possibly some or all of the street address you use for your billing
on your credit card.)

Customer data that is stored electronically is encrypted and divided so that
multiple systems would have to be stolen or compromised in order for the
original data to be usable. Backup data is similarly divided so no one
tape or disc is useful by itself. Obsolete data is destroyed.

While state, local and federal local judges can order us to supply account
information, per the Electronic Communication Privacy Act, e-mailbox content
can only be obtained via a federal court order.

However, it should be stated that under the Patriot Act and associated laws
enacted in 2001, certain agencies of the U.S. Government feel that any
Internet subscriber may have their account information disclosed, stored
data copied (including e-mailbox content) and subsequent Internet activity
monitored and copies retained by federal employees for an unlimited period
of time, without even being the specific target of an investigation,
and that all of this can be done without any type of court order and
without any disclosure to the customer that such activity occurred,
even well after monitoring has been discontinued. As the Internet provider,
we are usually prohibited from telling anyone about such monitoring
events, who was targeted and what periods of time were monitored.
They usually do not tell us why they are spying on you or if there was
a reason.

Considering this interpretation of U. S. law that is currently being
exploited by select agencies of the federal government, there is a limit
to what privacy we or any other Internet provider can honestly deliver.
There have also been cases where the government has simply seized the
machines storing the "cloud" content for thousands of customers as
part of an investigation involving one customer who might have had data
on that system. Such data may never be made available to you again.

We therefore advise users of the Internet to not keep e-mail on
any Internet mail servers operated by anybody for any period longer than
necessary, so that past e-mail is not available to such snooping
activity, and that customers consider using extremely strong encryption
for even casual communications. We also strongly advise that you avoid
"keep forever" free e-mail services that keep copies of your messages even
if you delete them. Do you really want your e-mail messages from years ago
to be available for government inspection whenever they want at some
future date, and without your permission or knowledge?

Regrettably, you must always assume that no message or conversation
sent via the Internet is completely private, and that the secret contents
of even an encrypted message may eventually become known.
Ready to fire everybody in Washington? We are.

You should also not rely exclusively on "cloud storage services",
because one day they may be gone and your access to that data is lost
because of business failure, equipment failure, or government intervention.
Be sure to keep original copies of everything you care about. And on that
note...

Backups are YOUR responsibility

Despite steps we take to protect hosted (or "cloud") data, the customer
must not treat such data as being invulnerable. It is the sole
responsibility of the customer to maintain complete and current
copies of data they may upload to our servers, including all of their own
web sites' content, as well as the software used to administer and
upload and "publish" and administer the web site content. (This is
particularly important for web sites controlled by FrontPage or similar
web site administration software.)
Why.Net takes absolutely no responsibility for the loss of stored
customer content (including web site content) regardless of the cause of
the loss, nor in the loss/obsolescence of the upload or maintenance tools
that the customer used to upload data to the servers, including web site
content.
The Customer assumes all responsibility for all direct and indirect
consequences and damages resulting from not maintaining backups of data
that is stored in the "cloud", or hosted content of a web site, as well as
damages and/or harm from not having those backups readily available if
they are needed.
The Customer also assumes all responsibility for keeping utilities,
programs, and other software used to transfer files to and from customer
equipment to the hosting provider up to date, and utilizing software that
is still supported by the software vendor as well as Why.net.

In the event of hardware or software failure on the e-mail equipment, e-mail
left on the servers may also be lost. It is the customers responsibility
to remove of their e-mail from the servers at regular intervals or to make
copies of that data if it is going to be left on the Why.Net servers.
Once messages are placed into a customers e-mailbox, the safety of that
e-mail is entirely the responsibility of the customer. For a number of
good reasons, we do not make or keep copies of mailbox contents,
except as part of certain infrequent maintenance tasks, after which any
copies are destroyed.